The e-book wars of 2010: displays and hardware

This year will see a tidal wave of e-readers arrive on US shores, and as soon …

The color transition

Mirasol from Qualcomm

E-Ink may be the 800lb gorilla of the emerging e-reader market, but it's not the only game in town. I got a close-up look at Qualcomm's Mirasol, MEMS-based technology that I mentioned in my CES preview article. A Qualcomm rep showed me a static screen with a color picture on it, and I have to admit to being pretty disappointed.

I saw the screen in some good light, but color saturation was just too poor; the dpi also seemed quite low. It sort of looked like an old-timey lithograph; if the unit had featured not a magazine cover but a Union soldier holding a rifle, it would've been a dead ringer for a piece of Civil War memorabilia. OK, that's an exaggeration, but it did look unexpectedly dim and metallic. I had seen a few photos of Mirasol that gave that impression and had been hoping that it was an artifact of the lighting or camera, but it isn't. The Mirasol demo doesn't quite seem ready for prime time to me.

I'm not ready to write Mirasol off yet, though. It looked better to me than the color E-Ink prototype that I saw, and the MEMs-based idea behind it seems solid. My guess is that they'll keep working on this until they get something more vibrant.

Tablets, slates, and hybrid approaches

The Entourage Edge

There are at least three attempts—the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Entourage Edge, and the Alex e-reader (more on the last two in a later article) that combine LCD and E-Ink in an attempt to get the best of both worlds. The Nook and the Alex have a similar layout, with a larger E-Ink screen sitting over a smaller LCD screen; both of the units run Android on the LCD portion.

LCD and OLED are also in the running, and I saw at least one e-reader based on the former out on the floor. Such "e-readers" are essentially tablets, and in fact the line between an e-reader, a tablet, and a portable media player seems fairly blurry right now and is drawn mainly based on size.

MSI's dual-screen e-reader/netbook combo

There is also at least one dual-LCD-screen e-reader/netbook combo from MSI, and other vendors may be pursuing this idea, as well.

Conclusions: in need of an edge

Almost everyone I talked to today in the e-book space realizes that the "e-reader" as such isn't really something you want to bet your company on unless you have a real edge. The reason is that people will read on any portable device with a screen; and with all of the tablets, "superphones," smartbooks, and so on slated for this year, e-readers will be competing for attention with that many more (full-color) screens. It's also the case that, as LCD alternatives like color E-Ink and Mirasol improve and acquire video capabilities, "e-readers" based on these passive display technologies will be competing with an assortment of phones, portable media players, tablets, and other devices that use those same passive displays.

So at some point soon, the dedicated "e-reader" will be about where the "feature phone" is in 2010—at the bottom of the mobile barrel, having been outclassed by a raft of devices that do much more than just display books.

The inevitable and soon-coming relegation of the dedicated e-reader to the boneyard of low-end, discount obsolescence has left e-reader makers scrambling for an edge. One of these edges is touch, but touch has two major problems: many readers will have it this year, and all of those touch-enabled readers will be more expensive than their non-touch counterparts. Even the ubiquity and added cost might be OK if touch wasn't super-wonky on an E-Ink screen, but it is. Refresh times for E-Ink are still low, and the result is that iPhone-trained users expect touch-based e-reader interfaces to react much faster than they're capable of. In the two demos I saw of the Skiff and the QUE, the former given by a Skiff executive and the latter given by the QUE's industrial designer, both demonstrators struggled at points with getting the display to respond as they tried to show off markup capabilities. Given this, I suspect that touch will frustrate many early-adopters this year.

In addition to touch, Skiff and QUE boast their thinness, size, and flexible substrates as edges over the competition. But because the two products are so comparable on those metrics, even that isn't enough. Increasingly, then, it's looking like the edge that every e-reading player will pursue is content availability. But the relationship between publishers and e-reading platforms is a topic for another day.

Because e-readers will be commodities by the second quarter of this year, the margins on such hardware will be fairly thin. But there are still major opportunities for making money in the e-book hardware space, if you can get your chips widely adopted by e-reader makers. That's where Marvell, Qualcomm, and others will compete with one another for a share of the growing e-reader pie. But that, too, is a story for another day.